Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad's Major Novels by Ludwig Schnauder (review)

The contemporary interest in examining the relationships between philosophy and literature, the inauguration of which might with some justice be attributed to Martha Nussbaum and her 1990 book Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, has resulted in studies of varying quality. Two recent volumes that passed my desk proposed either to examine philosophy and literature in dialogue or explore what philosophy might learn from the novel. Neither book entirely succeeded: in the one, the dialogue was mostly a philosophical monologue that relegated literature to a secondary place, and in the other the art of the novels was all but ignored in order to make the characters and stories serve the lessons demanded of philosophy. Ludwig Schnauder's monograph Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad's Major Novels, which focuses on Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent, shifts the balance from philosophy to the novel and explores the ways in which Conrad's art is a drama of philosophical, historical, and scientific ideas.

The book is written in a manner that seems to invite critical dialogue. Throughout, the prose is concise and clear and almost free of jargon, as if Schnauder is drawing readers into a conversation and we are to be made shared participants in the inquiry. He appears to write for an audience of general readers who have an interest in Conrad's art in relation to ideas. The argument never loses sight of the words and details in Conrad's novels; one feels as if Schnauder regularly turns to readers and says, "see here, and here, and here again" in guiding us through the narratives. It is a book that can be productively used by undergraduate and graduate students to begin contemplating how novelists wrestle with ideas they may otherwise believe remain within the realms of philosophy and science.

Each chapter is numbered, with the sequence beginning at the one-page introduction, which is really a statement of purpose, and ending with the eleven-page conclusion, which is a recapitulation that does not add anything substantially new. Much of the content of each chapter can be gleaned by the subsection titles, which also signal how the inquiries are formulated. For example, the six sections on The Secret Agent are: The Representation of London; The Ambiguity of Time; Society and its Control Mechanisms; Society and Economic Determinism; Society and Variants of Darwinian Determinism; The Individual, Freedom, and Morality.

The second chapter, "Free Will and Determinism: A Philosophical Introduction," launches the study by surveying the key philosophers, the arguments for and against determinism and indeterminism, and the place of the subject in the history of philosophy. As Schnauder explains, there are "three major ways of thinking about the problem" that "can best be understood by analyzing their respective positions with regard to […] the relationship between free choices, moral responsibility, and determinism" (9). Early on the definitions are clearly stated: a) "Hard determinists are incompatibilists: they believe […] that all our choices are caused and that therefore none of our choices are free" (9); b) Soft determinists are compatibilists and "believe that the fact that a choice and its resulting action are caused does not mean that they are not free" (10); c) "Libertarians believe that we sometimes choose freely and at those times—and only at those times—are morally responsible for our behavior" and they "are incompatibilists in so far as they hold that caused choices cannot be free" (12). The history of the major statements of these arguments in philosophy, which is concise and reasonably effective, begins with René Descartes and ends with Ted Honderich and Thomas Nagel.

"Free Will and Determinism in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain" is the focus of the third chapter. The first section provides an overview of "Victorian Compatibilism" by commenting on figures such as Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Thomas Malthus, and Charles Darwin. The second section, "Late Victorian and Early Modernist Incompatibilism," traces later...